Thanks to LaRacasse for suggesting a story set in India, and homage to E. M. Forster, creator of a masterpiece. I have tried to capture the language and attitudes of the time (roughly 1925), even as I exaggerated them in this parody; that which is offensive today was common speech then, and vice versa. So if racism and other political incorrectnesses offend you, read no more here. Don't raise your blood pressure.
This is a PARODY. Therefore, don't expect a great deal of sex, as there was none in the original work I'm seeking to parody. And of course I've stolen a good bit of (public domain) Rudyard Kipling as well. Could hardly have British India without Kipling. He virtually patented it.
++++++++++++++++
As the
Kaisar-I-Hind
, hustled and hectored by the tugs at her port side, came slowly up to the pier at Bombay, Mrs. Moore wondered, not for the first time nor for the last, "
Que diable allais-je faire dans cette galère
?", the long voyage from Southampton not in the least having impaired either her knowledge of French nor yet her knowledge of Molière.
To the casual observer, and as far as her world, the world of Tunbridge Wells, knew, she had come to India's sunny clime to serve as chaperone for her son's betrothed, Adela Quested, who was to follow on the
Baroda
, until their marriage at Simla that summer.
He was a disgusting baby,
she thought,
who grew up into an intolerable, self-important young prig. And yet he is better than his father, that bloody swine!
The said bloody swine, her deceased husband Ethelred Moore, was a product of his age, of Winchester School, and of shabby gentility, until he came to the notice of his uncle, Sir Mountstewart Heaslop, Bart. The Baronet, a man whose girth was exceeded only by his vainglory, had been unable to produce a male heir, or indeed any heir. His wife, another of the shabby-genteel maidens a great number of whom were products of English society in the Eighties of the Nineteenth Century, who was first sterilized by, and then killed by, the syphilis he had bestowed upon her, could produce none, and no Irish maidservant, to say nothing of an English lady (Scotswomen he could not abide), would come within a kilometre of his disgusting person.
Sir Mountstewart bethought himself next of nephew Ethelred, his nearest male kin, then a subaltern in the King's Own Worcestershire Light Infantry, unmarried, unencumbered by wealth but encumbered with a taste for the
haut monde
. If the young laddie would marry, beget a son, which said son would take the surname, not of his father, but of his uncle Mountie, why, the young laddie should find the Baronet not ungenerous, no no, not at all.
Lieutenant Moore, apprised that substantial wealth should be his if he would merely do what any right-thinking, clean-living, God-fearing young Englishman should do, applied himself to the task.
My God
, thought Mrs Moore,
what a life
! Trapped between genteel starvation and marital prostitution, she chose the latter.
The wrong choice.
When young Ethelred paid court to her in 1897, the world opened to her. The convent school, with its sexual excesses and immersion in Sapphism
extrèmement et toutfois
, had readied her to accept degradation in any form--after the dildoes, the fingerings, the weeks of performing cunnilingus on post-menstruating old women that merged into years of unending sexual serfdom--marriage to Ethelred would be a treat after that.
Oh, was I wrong!
Ethelred, though not over-endowed with length, nevertheless was thick of penis and determined of purpose. One hundred seventy thousands of Sir Mountstewart's pounds was a
bello spendere
, as they said in Naples, even after the 1894 death duties.
He celebrated their marriage by raping her every night for a month. Her maidenhead yielded the first night, in a cascade of blood, as he tore into her. Her barely lubricated labia were rubbed raw, again and again, by his fierce thrusts, as he pinned her to the bed. Her screams and bleeding loins did not in the least dissuade this man, this
beast
, to whom she had entrusted her life, her fortune and her sacred honor. It was, after all, only business, nothing personal, doncherknow?
Nothing was more disgusting, nothing, not even Sister Perpetua's urine in her face as she nibbled the Superior's foul-smelling pussy. Or so she thought.
Until that morning when, springing out of bed under the direst of compulsions, she barely achieved the bathroom sink, and regurgitated her soul. And the next day. And the next. And before luncheon. And after luncheon.
Then she saw the letter. It changed her life indelibly, ineluctably, indescribably.
Ethelred had been summoned to Whitehall. The messenger had arrived as he was writing, but the imperative command would brook not the slightest delay. Saying nothing to her (but why should he? They had not spoken in days), he sprang to the proffered calèche and was off.
She looked. Stunned, she read. "Lieutenant Steuart Albert George Catterson, K.O.W.L.I., Redditch Barracks, Redditch. Darling Steuie, Thanks be to God, the deed is done, she is with pup! What a month, darling boy, what a month of horror, burying my Essential, which should belong only to you, in that wretched orifice nightly. Her jewel, forsooth! Yet nothing will keep me from my darling Steuie! I trust the little bugger will be a boy, God grant! Then my wretched uncle Mountstewart will down with the
pecuniæ
, and be the source of my mounting my own Steuart forever, as we should be, as we should live--haha! We shall both of us be quit of the Army, of the inelegance, the torpid ennui. O, I long for your elegant shaft, and the sweetest taste I wot of, that of your elixir of love, poured into my mouth. How I will taste each of your glorious pendula, lick your perineum, and at last bring my tongue and lips to the source of all my joy, your glorious Nether Entrance, truly as Wagner has said, the Venusberg, the hidden sanctuary of our love. How I will penetrate you and penetrate you, and spill my heart and soul in every drop of my spend in your---"
She ran to the bathroom and threw up, as if she could expel the fruit of this man's degeneracy from her womb, the filth he had planted there. But why?
She kept away from him, and he was just as happy. She finally arrived at the truth, by dint of repeated importunings of the solicitor's latest pupil, who was in love with her. She obtained, quite without the solicitor's knowledge, enough of a glimpse of Sir Mountstewart's will to find out the import of her pregnancy, now well advanced.
Lieutenant Moore was now gone to the Soudan, marching with Lord Kitchener to avenge the fallen hero Gordon of Khartoum. Sir Mountstewart died a raving lunatic, as Lieutenant Moore reached the city of Khartoum. Trying to evade a maniacal dervish, Lieutenant Moore was bayonetted by one of his own men, with whom, in derogation of his professed love for Steuie, he had tried to "interfere", and was dead of the wound the next day.
The following day Ronald Augustus Heaslop was born. Mrs Moore inherited her husband's money, suppressing the will made in favor of "Steuie", who dared not speak his name.
Mrs Moore handed over the rearing of her son, whom she detested, to servants. Notwithstanding and nonetheless, she and Ronald maintained a public facade of mother-love and filial devotion.
Ronald missed the Great War by days, arriving in France, with a despondent draft of replacements for the slain and maimed in his father's old regiment, on November 12, 1918.
"Darling Steuie" Catterson, now a Lieutenant-Colonel whose retirement was delayed by the outbreak of war, took one look at the new subaltern and decided he would never do. "Got to get rid of this sprig, Newton," he told the Adjutant. "See to it, won't you, there's a good chappie."
"Sir, haven't anywhere to send him, we're full up,
complêt
as these bloody Frenchies say, what?"
"Well, Christ's bloody wounds, don't make your problem into my problem! Solve the friggin' thing, or I'll have your bollocks for breakfast."
Duly admonished, the Adjutant telephoned to the War Office. Subaltern Ronald Augustus Heaslop was demobbed and sent to India, to become Assistant Resident Magistrate of the town of Agashiwallah, miles from nowhere. Ronald, brash but withal the product of an English public school, soon found the way to discharge his duties was to thrash his bearer, babu, sais, khitmutgar, khamsaman, punkahwallah,
dhobi
and
bhisti
and everyone with a skin darker than his, not less often than thrice daily. And to require their female relatives to fellate him on demand. The district was quiet; he was promoted Resident Magistrate, and twice had leave for a year to return to England.
His tastes were not those of his father. He found release in some of the better London bordellos; and, at a garden party given by the great-nephew of Sir Mountstewart, he met young Adela Quested.
By Jove!
he thought.
She has titties, real big ones, not like those emaciated specimens one sees in Bond Street! And a real arse, that sticks out and all! Not like those beanpoles, dressed up to look like boys by the jew poofters who make women's clothing! She'd do to keep me company back in Uttar Pradesh.
He proposed. She, sensing escape, accepted.
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The voyage had been a barely sustainable horror. Sharing a stateroom was necessary, and Mrs Moore was billeted with Edna Shawangunk, an American heiress now Anglicized by marriage as Lady Bitsfugger. She was old, vulgar of speech, and the possessor of a rebellious digestion that rendered the stateroom frequently uninhabitable, even by the least fastidious.
"Jes' call me Bits, ev'erbuddy does," was her greeting to Mrs Moore.
Entering the stateroom and trying to find space for her reticule amidst the overflowing trunks and fitments of Lady Bitsfugger, she simultaneously gagged and fell forward as a lengthy, sonorous expulsion issued from her co-tenant, the Peeress.
"Good God, that wass a good 'un, what?" said Her Ladyship.